An Activist Critic And The Inescapable Art

May 31, 1998|By Blair Kamin.

The corncob-shaped towers of Marina City and the wall of skyscrapers along West Wacker Drive loomed into view as the Brown Line rumbled over the Chicago River. The woman sitting next to me, a stranger wearing a stylish black hat, looked out the window of the elevated train and asked: "Do you know what a beautiful city you live in?"

Lady, I sure do.

Having my job is a little bit like being a sports writer and covering Michael Jordan. While recent buildings, like the leaden Harold Washington Library Center, haven't upheld Chicago's reputation as the capital of American architecture, the town still packs an extraordinary punch. No other city is stocked with a concentration of masterpieces by the likes of Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Helmut Jahn. Visitors, like my black-hatted acquaintance on the L, tend to come here and swoon.

Because architecture is the art that most visibly and viscerally defines Chicago, my mission is straightforward: Protect the best of the past while encouraging the creation of tomorrow's landmarks. Along the way, I want to enable Tribune readers to interpret, to evaluate and to have an impact on the buildings and the urban spaces (parks, playgrounds, streets and sidewalks) that shape their lives.

All the arts possess the capacity to transform our vision of reality, but for better and for worse, only architecture is the inescapable art. You don't have to go to a play that the theater critic pans, a movie that the film critic hates or a restaurant where, according to the food critic's taste buds, the chef can't cook.

But we are hardly so lucky with one-star buildings like Comiskey Park, with its ski slope-like upper deck, or the Apparel Center and Holiday Inn Mart Plaza, a concrete hulk that mars the downtown bend of the Chicago River. A bad review from me won't make them disappear. The public must live with them for decades. And the consequences extend beyond visual blight. Think of the way McCormick Place brutally interrupts the wide-open spaces of the Chicago lakefront, gobbling up what otherwise would park land.

That's why my writing is informed by the idea of "activist criticism." The term was coined by the San Francisco Chronicle's Allan Temko, but the philosophy has been practiced by critics ranging from Ada Louise Huxtable to my predecessor at the Tribune, Paul Gapp. When you are an activist critic, you do not wait for mistakes to happen and bemoan the results after the fact. You whack at the offending party with the journalistic equivalent of a 2-by-4 -and, occasionally, you avert disaster.

Consider what happened in 1996 when the City Council of Chicago secretly stripped 30 buildings and sites of temporary landmark protection, raising the specter that buildings by Sullivan, Wright, Mies and others would be demolished or defaced. After a public uproar sparked by numerous stories in the Tribune - hundreds of letters poured into City Hall - Mayor Richard M. Daley forced the scheming aldermen to grant permanent landmark status to 29 of the 30 sites.

Besides throwing roadblocks in the path of bad plans, an activist critic is obliged to point the way toward good ones. Writing a series of articles on successful low-income housing, as I did in 1995, focused public attention on alternatives to the horrid conditions of Chicago's high-rise public housing projects. Since then, it has been gratifying to see some of the worst high-rises torn down and replaced with homes built to a human scale.

The housing and landmarks stories demonstrate that architecture critics proceed at their peril if they ignore the underlying forces that shape the built world or restrict themselves to "high style" buildings like an art museum.

Activist criticism is not just about architects, but about those who often are the actual architects of our surroundings: politicians, real estate developers, traffic engineers whoever, in short, exerts control over the buildings and urban spaces with which we live. Reviews that focus on aesthetics are an essential part of the beat, but news stories and analyses that bring politics and economics into the picture are every bit as important because they show who's really designing the city.

When I do consider reviewing a building, I ask a brutally simple question: Why should anybody care about it? There has to be some compelling reason outrage at its ugliness or impracticability, for example - that the reader will choose to spend a few minutes reading about architecture. Without that hook, I'm sunk.